Living On The Bleeding Edge — Mehul Agarwal of WinWire Technologies

I had the pleasure of interviewing Mehul Agarwal with WinWire Technologies, He has built several large customer accounts, one of which was the largest customer account he built from the ground up in merely 3 years grossing over $45 Mil in revenues from a cold call for one of the previous companies he has worked with.

Gene: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. Please give us a brief overview of your background and how you got started in this industry.

I am a Customer Success, Business Development and Marketing expert working with both users and creators of technologies to achieve their engineering & technology goals. I have worked with several startups, mid-size and large companies from the valley and outside especially in the fintech, medical devices, connected devices, amongst others. I have generated over $45 Mil in revenue in the last couple years building one of the largest customer accounts for one of the companies I worked with. I mentor startups from around the world on sales, strategy, growth marketing both as part of accelerator programs and independent companies.

Gene: Can you please tell us more about what your company does? I love learning about cool new tech, so please feel free to geek out with me on this.

WinWire Technologies, a Microsoft Managed Partner helps clients gain competitive advantage through innovative software solutions. We help enterprises stitch the digital fabric while taking into consideration both the legacy applications (ERP, CRM, SCM etc.) and the next-gen technologies (Cloud, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Advanced Analytics, Internet of Things, Mobility, Security, and UI/UX to build systems of intelligence. We work with large and mid-sized enterprises to design, develop, and manage a wide range of intelligent platforms and applications, across industries and business functions.

Gene: Who are your competitors in this space? What makes your company stand out?

Since we work with both large enterprises and mid-size companies, we usually compete with some large companies as well as small players but what makes us unique is our ability to deliver, flexibility in engaging with customers and most importantly deep Microsoft technology expertise. Also, our record of leadership in exceptional technology solutions delivery, and ‘People First’culture makes WinWire ideal technology partner for our customers.

What sort of traction have you guys gotten so far? Are you a well known brand? Still in the startup stage? Or somewhere in the middle?

I’d say we have gotten some good traction in the last 10 years, and we have been helping several large enterprises in their digital transformation journey. We still have a long way to go. Our long-standing relationship with our customers is a testimony of recognition in the niche space we are in.

Gene: What is the most innovative project that you have ever worked on?

We have worked on number very interesting and innovative projects, one that comes to my mind is: One such project was a Global Scheduling System developed for an automotive company, whose IT infrastructure comprised several disparate applications supporting multiple complex business processes. This caused several challenges — limited enterprise reporting, lack of mobility, inefficient resource management and an inability to configure local settings across their global locations. WinWire designed and delivered a unified view of the customer using Microsoft Azure and .NET; an integrated global scheduling system that could string together the sales, delivery, and service capacities across geographies. Among several other benefits, the client found savings opportunities due to effective synchronization, and more importantly, growth opportunities from a single data repository reports and strategic insights. IoT Solution for High Tech Manufacturing where we built Rich dashboards to monitor devices and reduce downtime by over 30% for the fab machine pump parts by taking required action immediately as the problem occurs and increase operational efficiency.

Gene: Who is your hero (In your business or personal life)? How have they inspired you to become the person you are today.

I do not have one hero. I like Elon for his vision, Warren Buffet for his simple lifestyle. Steve Jobs for his marketing skills. Gary Vaynerchuk for his hard work. Aaron Levie for his tweets. Some of these names have helped me get inspired from various aspects as I mentioned.

Gene: If you could jump into a time machine, go back in time, and change one aspect of your past, what would it be, and why?

This is a great question, I’d have loved to be 6' 9" and have had a chance to play pro basketball, jokes aside, I wouldn’t change anything since I am pretty content with who I am today and that has happened because of the experiences and situations that I have been through.

Gene: How will the work, your team is doing impact humanity in the future? For example, bringing people closer together, creating more jobs, create killer robots that will destroy all of humanity (joking), etc.

Well, we are building more and more tech products and solutions that’re simplifying the way we operate and also are helping the behemoth enterprises and smaller companies build products faster that’s going to revolutionize the human race and its future. In the process, we are able to create a lot of jobs and to comment on creating robots, we are creating a lot of bots that’s supporting us to focus on more creative and important tasks.

Gene: Throughout our careers, we have all run into a few roadblocks. Can you please tell us

about a time that you failed? How did you motivate yourself to keep going?
I have failed several times and seen a lot of adversities thus far, One such roadblock was getting left out on the education front during my sophomore year in the bachelors where I got stuck and my education was going nowhere, it was also the early stage in my professional career which was also not
that great, My life was full of doubts since I wasn’t good at studies, I was able to find to way to give up my job for couple months focus on education and finish that. I just reminded myself everyday of my goals and
where I needed to be and this was the only path to success, take it or leave it, it was tough but it was worth it.

Gene: What advice would you give to an inexperienced founder of a technology company?

Speed is the game and it’s pretty uncomfortable to be founder, a lot of times a number of factors slow us down and, in the process, someone else takes over the space so focusing on speed is the important and shipping products faster is super important

Gene: If you could spend one day with any person (alive or not), who would it be any why?

Elon Musk, I’d like to learn how he thinks and what motivates him to work on such large problem sets.